Creating Focus

You are sitting in your parents living room, enjoying coffee and their company when your phone dings. Immediately your hand shoots out and swipes the screen- would you look at that! Sally’s little boy just took his first steps! How cute!!

Cute? Yes, of course! But, now your attention has been pulled away from these few precious moments and into Sally’s world. Unfortunately, this happens all too often in our every day lives. When we’re at work or school, with friends, family, and even with our spouse. When that phone dings, our brains create a sense of urgency. We need to respond fast! If we don’t, then we miss our chance!

Even beyond our phones, we quickly get pulled away from what’s truly important to us. Every night out with friends becomes a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Every work assignment becomes a career-changing task. And every phone call is like a ticking time bomb. Pretty soon our lives are so filled with the urgent, we have no time left for the important.

You plan an evening by the fire with your special someone, then the work dinner gets planned for the same night. These events don’t happen every week. If you don’t go, your co-workers won’t respect you, right? Clearly, you can’t re-arrange the work schedule when so many others are involved, so your loved one can wait until tomorrow, right? All too soon, you’ve pushed off that fireside cuddle for months. Sometimes, it is truly important that we be somewhere else. More often, though, we are responding to the urgency our brain has placed on these events. If we can find some energy to create a pause when those alarm bells go off, we can better assess what is truly important to our lives.